The content purpose of a dream

Ok, so dreaming is important for learning tasks, integrating personal experiences, training your brain and be a coherent person in the waking life. It's also clear that the impulses come from within. External stimuli are shut out, and even if they pass the barrier they end up incorporated in the dream, but they are not driving the plot. Meanwhile we forget most of our dreams and the majority of those we recall we forget about within a few minutes even. We recall but an incredible low amount of them. It doesn't even seem that we are supposed to remember dreams, since the memory that stores them is shut down in the brain while dreaming. If we are not meant to remember, is the content even important to us in our waking life? Why even bother translating them?

Well let us examine closer what neurologically happens in our brain when we dream. Perhaps it can give us a better insight.

DREAMS CAUSED BY EMOTIONS  IN SYMBOLICAL LANGUAGE

dreaming brain

This drawing is based on an updated version of Hobson, and information from Schwart and Maquet. The brainparts A, B, C, D, and E in pink are those that are only partially active: they block input or output for example. 1 to 9 are active in dream sleep.

1. Pontine stem
   
2. Thalamus
   
3. RT hypothalamus
   
4. Amygdala, lymbic and paralymbic
   
5. anterior cingulate
   
6. basic ganglia
7. visual association cortex
8. right inferior parietal cortex
9. cerebellum

• A - Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
• B - Posterior cyngulate gyrus and precuneus
• C - Primary motor cortex
• D - primary somatosensory cortex
• E - primary visual cortex
  

So what are they and what is the consequence? Let us first look at what gets shut out or turned off.

First there is a group of centers that isolate us physically from our external surrindings. With C off our body is paralyzed during the dream. With D and E the input senses get disconnected, and hardly an external sensory input gets through. This makes sure we do not get disturbed while we dream, nor break our neck. It also prevents that a real life stimulus might be mistakenly identified in the dream as a symbol of importance.

Next there is a group that makes sure we do not even connect to the outside world in memory and inner perception. We do not just shut out the physical world, we also shut off the memory of the real rational world. It's as if we pull the plug on the rational inside of ourselves. A normally helps to construct our perception of a rational world. When it's turned off we lose our will and reflective awareness. Hence, our ego becomes but one of the many characters in the dream plot. Without will and reflective awareness, we undergo the dream experience without even considering to take matters in our own hands. The dream will lack a coherent connection to the waking life, and we accept the bizarre and irrational without any reserves.
B too belongs to an area that helps us shut off the inner memory of the rational world. Normally it helps us recall and process visual or episodic memory. Turned off, sudden scene changes are perceived as normal. But most importantly it prevents the real life situations that led to the dream to be represented in the dream in the way they actually happened.You may still be dreaming about an issue of your waking life, but it won't be represented like that particular situation from your memory.

The last group, the blue area that gets completely shut off in the left brain hemisphere, shuts out the literal meanings out of our dreams, and instead is the reason why dream elements are symbols instead of real life references. For one, we end up having a hard time distinguishing between ourselves and the perspective of others. We may end up seeing ourselves as a stranger as self at the same time. We cannot identify and name things as what they are in our everyday life, so the imagery we see does not represent the same thing as in real life. Both these blocked area make it why your mother in a dream does not refer to your real mother, but to the mother character that lives in your pshyche; or that your best friend  in your dream is a personificatoin of the qualities you project on her or him in your waking life. It means that the image-language of the dreams is a language of symbols, metaphors, association and pictographs.
And that is one of the reasons why it is so important to shut down sensory input. If we are dreaming about symbols and some real life input gets through which is not a symbol at all, we might mistakenly take it for a symbol.

If we look at all the centers that get activated they fit with what we already can conclude of the parts of the brain that get shut off. 1 and 2 are involved with REM sleep and sleep cycle control, and they tell other parts of the brain to pay attention to what is coming. As a consequence of both you are conscious when you dream. You sleep and have no awareness of the outside world, but you are aware of the dream.

Then there is a group that helps to enhance the perception that the dream is somethign we are really experiencing. 6 and 9 make sure that you perceive yourself as moving in the dream and have bodily senses. 

A third group is related to the cause of the dream. 3, 4 and 5 make that the content is emotionally related: things we desire or have a deep fear for, emotional memories that are the cause of the dream. Our emotions in the dream are not just a response to the images. It is thought to be the reverse. Our emotions are the cause of the dream and end up being translated into a story to integrate our anxiety, fears and desires. 5 produces dramatizations that can portray our conceptual waking concerns, focuses on what in our waking life causes friction between ourselves and the waking world, and hints at how to take action to solve the anomaly.  

The last group deals with the emotional symbolical language of the dream. 7 processes visual content derived from emotional information, and uses the associations stored in our memory, while 8 gets to work to perceive an imagery dreamspace with symbolical imagery, and makes meaning out of the metaphors in narrative descriptions.

summary


So, we can conclude that a dream originates from within. We are conscious in a dream (but not in a way as you are in the waking world, because you lack rational connection), that is we perceive we are awake in a world that is not obligated to be coherent as in real life to get its point across.

Time and linear logic is of no meaning. The dream therefore can approach a theme from different angles, spaces and point of views until it finds a workable solution.

You have no will in the dream. Therefore we hardly ever come up with the idea to control our actions or even the dream itself. Only lucid dreaming (where we realize that we are actually dreaming and not awake) is a possible exception to it. Those are the dreams where we might think of taking control over our dream actions, but it is rarely total and often lasts for only a short time. It is to the dreamwork's benefit that we do not realize our ego could start to control the dream plot. It helps all the characters - who represent feelings, beliefs, fragments of our personality, threatening emotional memories - to act freely and express their nature without us inhibiting them.

While dreams may be bizarre to the waking mind, it may be quite coherent in a symbolical and hollistic sense. A dream translation can show exactly how logical and coherent a dream can really be.

The one thing that never ends up being bizarre when waking up are the emotions in the dream, and it seems more and more likely that it are emotions that drive the plot. The forebrain responds to these emotions by associating them with images to comprehend the emotional impulses.

Dreams deal with daily life events, but omit the real life event from the dream itself. 

GUIDELINES TO UNDERSTAND THE DREAM CONTENT

From all the above follows that

1. We cannot take a dream literally, almost never, but have to see every character, item and environment as a symbol. Even real life issues cannot be accurately represented as they are in real life. Nothing in the dream is what it is in the waking life. It does not matter whether you watched Alien on the television that week or not. Alien on the television is not what sparked the dream. It is but a symbol used in your dream. Not even words, spoken or written, are to be taken literal and rationally, but symbolically.
   
2. The dream has a major theme, and repeats it from several angles. Therefore a dream is not a linear story of cause and effect, but several attempts to tackle the same issue over and over until you get it right. That is usually where the dream ends.
3. In the dreamworld ever character ends up being a representation of a part of ourselves, free to do what is in their nature to do. In the waking world we can try to ignore them, bury them, hide them from ourselves. But we cannot in the dream.
4. There is a symbolical coherency and logic in the dream, even though there is no real life coherency or linear logic
5. Emotions seem to drive the plot. The associations and symbols in a dream therefore represent our emotional world. Our emotions are at the chore of the symbolical language.
   
6. There is a central image, a theme, that stands out, which is related to the strongest emotion in the dream.
7. The symbolical pertains associations (including loose ones), metaphors, puns. Objects and characters are not identified by its correct name (left hemisphere) but why their function and purpose. A "fork" becomes "something we eat with".
8. The dream is about a real life issue, but omits the event itself. Only the emotions, some charachters and actions may be present as fragments in the dream. This may be because the dream wants to resolve the emotional impact the event had, rather than the event itself.
   
9. The issue is a recent event, rarely older than a week. 
10. Dreams are about yourself, about unresolved parts of yourself against other self parts, about yourself in relation to your environment, and mostly how to resolve any anomaly within yourself. 
11. Because dreams seem to wish to resolve problems, it also includes foreseeable problems, and the dream may end up being foreward looking and predictive.
12. We are aware of feelings and thoughts of other characters in a dream. This may be to prepare us for social encounters in the waking world.

source: The Science of Dreaming